Breed wriggled on his knees, trying to stand up, his tattered dirty long johns showing, flesh wounds and broken fingers in both hands. There was a rascally, doomed look in his face. All his bluster had been cowed. He more than half believed the woman would shoot him. And a part of him wanted it. To see the glee in some of the surrounding eyes was a fate more horrible than he could have imagined. To have to live with the memory and the constant reminders was more than he thought he could endure. And what would his father say? Portion Breed, reclusive leader of the local renegades-extortionist, horse thief, and reputed murderer, who holed up somewhere along the river and sent his riders venturing out (the old villain himself had not been seen in years) to pilfer the town when need be, plague the settlers, cheat the Indians and Spaniards, and bleed the neighboring country for whatever they could get, appearing in town only in groups of four or more to get drunk, molest the dance girls, and then scoot back to their hiding places until the next foray-oh, to think what his father would say if he saw him now. Josh Breed would have preferred a headshot. But something worse was in store.
“Lad,” the woman called, turning her head just enough to address Lloyd. “You’re more of a man and a gentleman than anyone else I can see here. And I reckon you’ve got a score to settle with this dolly dumpling yourself for trying to horsewhip you. Go over to my cart. Down between the groceries you’ll find my trusty old cane.”
Lloyd darted a glance at his mother, but turned when Rapture hissed at him. He did not think it wise to ignore the woman with the revolvers, and he was curious about the request. He went to her pony cart and rummaged about until he did indeed find a cane, of a kind that reminded him of the insufferable schoolhouse back in Zanesville.
Breed’s remaining mates held their ground, one still stretched out in a stupor, the other two trembling in their boots, too afraid to run because the woman was such an accurate shot. No one else had the nerve to say a thing, and the crowd that had re-formed was too amorphous a creature to have any spine, and so gave in to prurience. Just what did this unnatural woman have in mind?
“Is this what you mean?” Lloyd asked, and to everyone watching he seemed much smaller and younger than he really was, sidling between the horse cart and the rough-hewn figure holding the fancy guns without a single quaver in her arms. Where had she come by such novel weapons, and how in blazes had she learned to use them so well? That was the question on everyone’s lips. (It would have been phrased rather more caustically by Josh Breed, but the essence was the same.) The poor fool struggled to his feet at last, straining to raise his britches,when the woman squeezed one of the triggers again and clipped a clod in front of him, which sprayed muck on him and sent him sprawling down in a collapse of cursing.
“That’s just right.” She nodded to Lloyd. “Now, none of you boys have had the stones to answer my question, which surprises me not one bit. You there, Joshua you called yourself? As if I should know or care. Well, my name is Fanny Ockleman-Fast Fanny to you. But once upon a time I used to be a schoolteacher. A terror, they called me when it came to discipline. Do you know what I did with unruly boys? Boys who showed no respect and thought they could bullyrag others?”
The whole street was silent. Even the animals seemed to be listening.
“I caned them, Joshua. I caned their hides for all to see.”
Hoots and catcalls went up around the gathering, and various children and stragglers dashed down the planks to spread the word. Joshua Breed had lost his pants and his wits and was going to get a whuppin’ by a gun-totin’ woman with a good start on a beard. Oh, this was too sweet to miss!
But the woman who called herself Fanny Ockleman did not take the cane switch from Lloyd, but instead directed him over toward the hapless Breed, who groveled in the mud. The trail buddy farthest away hightailed it off like a bleating goat. The other one, who had dropped the rifle, made a lunge for it, and had it shot from his grasp, so that the butt splintered and cut his face. He groped for his trousers and pivoted to flee in one motion-but the next shot forced him to dive for a horse trough, which he splashed into like a sack of corn heaved from a wagon, producing a roar of laughter from the spectators.
The news had reached the attention of what passed for the law in town, but, still reeling from the events of the previous night, with one of his deputies having been among the blinded vigilantes, and no love for the Breeds, who more or less ruled the vicinity, the so-called sheriff was not quick to try to assert authority now. Josh Breed knew that, with his friends on the run or incapacitated, he could not count on any help that would come in time. He peered up through bloodshot eyes and saw the little boy he had threatened with the whip striding toward him with the cane.
“Son,” Fanny intoned, lowering her guns. “I want you to give that blowhard a good licking. Five of the finest you can deliver. And one more for good measure.”
“You bitch!” Breed screamed, clawing at the mud with bullet-grazed mitts-desperate to scramble upright and grab for Lloyd all at once. He wanted to bite that blasted woman’s throat out. But he did not even manage to make it up to his haunches before Fanny had grazed his shin with another bullet, just as she had meant to do. Breed plopped forward, facedown in the street, his long-johnned rear end exposed now to Lloyd and the upraised cane.
“You know what to do,” Fanny called to Lloyd across the street, and expertly spat a full three feet without losing her cheroot. “Five of the best you can give, and one more to make the memory sore.”
While all this had been happening, Rapture had been beside herself with worry for Lloyd, and now to see him actively engaged gave her a rushing sense of disorientation, not unlike what she had experienced when the odd music box was opened back at the Clutters’. She saw him once again as utterly remote from her. He seemed to fit into the scene before her like a piece of puzzle slotted into position, and the thought filled her heart with dread. There was something monstrous in him that she could not accept as having come from inside herself. Truly, he seemed more the child of this man-witch, who had brought the beasts of the frontier village under her spell with an eerily composed violence of the kind that is not learned easily and was somehow invested with an authority far beyond the ken of the shopkeepers and malingerers there to witness it. The sky had gone jet-black over half the town, a harsh religious flare of sun striking a gunmetal edge along the running sheet of storm cloud. Rapture prayed that the lightning would come and disperse the gathering. But it did not come quite in time.
Lloyd stood above the prostrate figure of Joshua Breed, wounded, humbled, defenseless now. The boy saw in his mind the way the tough had directed the whip at him. One pass to scare, the next to smart. Every taunt and insult he had ever been subject to came back to him. The harassers of Zanesville. The robbers along the road. The devil in the lane in St. Louis.
He felt again those meat-slab hands on his slender hips. The excruciating agony of the penetration… the reaming… like an auger in a summer melon. The boar-heavy grunting… and the high-pitched laughter. The stench of the dung cart. And the smack of the spittle the beast let loose on the granite cobblestone when he was done with his desecration. It all came back. Everyone who had ever angered or abused him. The brats who had sabotaged his shrine to his sister, the pig who had tortured his beloved Hattie. He would repay all the evil debts, and he slashed down through the air with the cane, slicing across the filthy long johns with a fiendish sense of release and power. Again and again he struck, as the creature before him howled and squirmed. The force he felt in his little arm was like unto the wave of energy that had radiated through him from the Eye. His sense of time and the street scene around him blurred. There was just the thrashing joy of his vengeance, intoxicating him like a drug. Where before he had always had to outsmart his enemies-or use the Eye-to unleash some demonic force that had amazed him as much as his victims, here he was enjoying the animal truth of physical aggression and he gorged on it, whaling on the vulnerable idiot without mercy. He did not hear the call of Fanny Ockleman or his mother. He did not hear the thunder rumbling like a hundred laden wagons. He did not hear the cries of Joshua Breed, who had soiled his underwear at the second shot and was now bleeding across his exposed buttocks.